AUSCHWITZ

For many people the Nazi attempt to wipe out the Jewish population of the countries they controlled is summed up by one word – Auschwitz. 

This was the name the Nazis gave to the small Polish town of Oświęcim where they modified an old Polish Army barracks to create a concentration camp, not just for Jews but for gypsies, homosexuals, criminals, people with physical or mental disabilities etc and a prisoner of war camp for Soviet soldiers. 

They built a small gas chamber here …

… but it soon became clear that the camp was too small to cope with all the people being sent there.  So two kilometres away they established Auschwitz II – Birkenau.

Birkenau is enormous. 

Covering 450 acres, it contained over three hundred buildings and the number of men and women prisoners reached about 100,000 by 1944.  A total of about 1,100,000 died there of whom 90% were Jews.  They were housed in wooden huts or brick buildings, sleeping on straw on three tier bunks with up to eight people in each section.  As each section was little more than two metres wide we wondered how they ever fitted in!

New gas chambers were built and most of the women and children arriving there in cattle trucks like this one …

… were taken straight to a small copse to wait, often for hours in all weather (it gets very hot here in the summer and very cold in winter!) to be stripped of their clothes, have all their belongings confiscated, their heads shaved (human hair was valuable!) and be herded into a gas chamber to be killed by fumes given off by Cyclon B crystals.  Their bodies were then cremated and their ashes piled into pits like this one.  The inscription on the stones reads: To the memory of the men, women and children who fell victim to the Nazi genocide.  Here lie their ashes.  May their souls rest in peace.

In 1945 the Nazis tried to destroy the evidence of their crimes by blowing up the gas chambers but their ruins remain, as do a few huts and other buildings.

The two parts of Auschwitz are a lasting reminder of the depths to which people can sink but to our surprise there is an atmosphere of deep peace there, helped, perhaps, by the obvious reverence of most of the thousands of visitors.  And nature is taking over what is left.  During our visit we saw a wild hare, a swallow-tail butterfly, a flock of lapwings and many wild flowers like these in an old sewerage lake.